RAWALPINDI, May 12: The World Health Assembly opening in Geneva on Monday is to endorse a proposal under which the World Health Organisation (WHO) will draw up a model list of essential medicines for children and determine suitability criteria for dosage forms of medicines, with particular attention to conditions prevailing in developing countries, UN sources said.The WHO Model List of Essential Medicines is a vital instrument for promoting access to medicines generally. A review of the 14th Model List found at least 20 medicines that may be essential for children and are available in the developed countries’ market but are not listed. It found that 20 medicines did not exist in appropriate dosage forms.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers have been asked to devise new dosage forms and strengths of medicines which can be used by children of different ages. The assembly is expected to review the feasibility of manufacturing appropriate formulations for those priority medicines for which currently no dosage form for children exists.

On the recommendations by the WHO Expert Committee on Selection and Use of Essential Medicines, the assembly will identify the clinical-research gaps regarding safety and efficacy of essential medicines for children to improve suboptimal prescribing and dosing and facilitate regulatory approval of paediatric formulations.

An estimated 10.5 million children under the age of five die every year. Many of these deaths are from treatable conditions: the most common is pneumonia, but others include diarrhoea, HIV disease, AIDS and malaria.

Of the internationally agreed health-related development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration, two focus on significantly reducing this unacceptably high-level of child mortality. The Goal 4 aims to reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the mortality rate among children under five, and Goal 6 aims to have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and to have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Recent data, however, suggest that few countries are on track to achieve these goals, even though effective interventions exist for many of the conditions, at least for adults. The interventions entail use of “essential medicines”, i.e. they satisfy the priority healthcare needs of the population.

Many of these essential medicines, however, do not exist in dosage forms for children or, if they do, are not available in low- and middle-income countries.